FLOSS Gives India a Boost in Many Markets and Endeavors

A recent conference in India offered examples of how FLOSS affects everything from education and health services to internal software markets.

From banks and hospitals to software
houses and prestigious technological institutions, the charm of
free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) is casting a spell in
India that is pushing many here to venture into uncharted
fields.

Stories of unanticipated efficiency, innovative solutions and
slashed costs surfaced at a two-day seminar titled "Enterprise
GNU/Linux Implementation: Evaluating Non-Proprietary Software for
the Enterprise", held in mid-June in India's commercial capital of
Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The seminar was presented by global
business information company
MarcusEvans.

Participants at this most recent meeting included techies and
executives from banking and finance, including Canara Bank, ING
Vysya Life Insurance, Kotak Securities, Syndicate Bank; IT
corporates, such as Blue Star Infotech, Micropro Software of Pune;
giant Government of India companies, including Hindustan Petroleum,
Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd; academic institutions, such as KReSIT
of the IIT Bombay; and others.

"Once big names like IBM, Oracle and Sun started supporting
Linux in a big way, confidence levels of the industry grew", said
Neeraj Bhai, the chief technical officer of India's young
private-sector, technology-driven IDBI Bank. It has 98 banking
offices and 274 ATMs across the country. Linux is used in IDBI Bank
for e-mail servers, Internet messaging, intrusion detection
systems, Oracle-based applications on human resources and finance
and even an IVRS (interactive voice response system). "We've saved
both on hardware and administration cost. This is not the beaten
track. Linux has not been widely tested in the (conservative)
finance or banking scenario (in these parts of the world). We are
among the first in Asia-Pacific to do it", Bhai added.

Linux also is being used at the prestigious Mumbai-based
Breach Candy Hospital. GNU/Linux has stepped in as a solution for
some 70 or so desktops, being used by doctors and clerks. "Our
doctors are happy, very happy," said Dilip M Desai, manager of
information systems at Breach Candy Hospital. "It is being used for
our hospital administration. It captures data from the central
server and displays it on PCs and desktops. Our uses [of
Linux-based solutions] include showing how many hospital rooms are
vacant and what's the charge for each room", Desai added.

Of late, the hystopathology department of the hospital is
looking at using a Linux-based solution to track reports of cancer
patients that need to maintain records over long years of the
disease. Desai said, "Linux has resulted in a considerable cost
reduction for software. There is a high level of security, and it
adds to the longevity of legacy systems. It is also very stable and
needs little support, besides being less vulnerable to various
attacks."

From the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, another prominent
region in the IT field, officer N.C. Nagarjuna Reddy stressed how a
department with a tough job--preserving land records, some of which
trace back centuries--is deploying GNU/Linux solutions. Despite the
teething problems, GNU/Linux solutions were taken to 103 locations
in 2001, another 136 in 2002 and an addition so far this year.
"Since Linux is very mean in using resources, we started using
desktops as servers", said Reddy. "An entry-level server with UNIX
could have cost about Rs 200,000. We got a desktop server with
Linux for just Rs 45,000. You may multiply the figure by 387", he
said, proudly pointing to the money saved.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gautam Shroff, head of architecture and
technology practice for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), said, "I
am not an evangelist but definitely a fan of open source." TCS
calls itself Asia's largest global software and services company.
Shroff said the "TCO (total cost of ownership) is definitely
lowered by Linux adoption, which improves the RoI (return on
investment. There is a big decrease in the perceived difficulty of
using Linux. The number of security threats on Linux web-servers is
dramatically lower too."

Shroff also said enterprises are shifting from using Linux
for "traditional" roles to more "contemporary" and "evolving"
purposes. Previously, FLOSS was seen as good for firewalls,
print/file servers, web servers and e-mail. Contemporary uses have
included deploying it for superclusters, software development,
e-commerce, embedded devices and branch automation, said Dr Shroff.
Evolving uses for FLOSS in India include deploying it for database
servers, ERP, CRM and SCM.

On the topic, Shroff said,"I build proprietary software
myself. We invest huge amounts of money in that. But if you got
limited resources and a great idea, then open source is the best
way to make it happen."

Shroff gave hints that TCS has plans to launch an open-source
Lab in the Indian capital of New Delhi, possibly involving IBM and
Red Hat along with TCS, which is a division of India's giant Tatas
business house. "If the campaign against piracy gets too strict, it
could drive Linux. In some sense, Microsoft recognizes that very
strong anti-piracy drives against SMEs (small and medium
enterprises) will not pay", added Shroff.

Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) provides R&D support
to India's nuclear power reactor programme, which has an installed
capacity of 2,000 MW and plans for a ten-fold increase by the year
2020. Kaura hinted at the pressures that arose in the field of
technology transfer following India's nuclear blasts in 1998. This
type of transfer problem doesn't afflict FLOSS users. BARC
associate director Harish Kumar Kaura said, "Up to 10-12 [ago],
every system we got from abroad required [us] to be supplied with
the source code... Now, everything (we buy) is a black box. We have
about 2,500 scientists, mainly using FORTRAN, and their main
requirement is computational speed."

Kaura added, "It was known that nobody [read, the US] would
give supercomputers to BARC. We are now using open source for our
Internet and e-mail servers, computing clusters, supercomputers,
advanced graphics systems, specialised database systems; we now are
looking at it for computing grids."

The computers' scalable graphics systems use a number of
Linux-based graphics workstations to achieve a display resolution
of over 100 million pixels and a rendering speed of over 100
million polygons per second.

"Ours is the latest stock exchange to be set up in India [in
1993-94]. Earlier, all were localized and regional stock exchanges.
Ours covers 360 cities and towns" said National Stock Exchange's
NSE.IT senior vice president G.M. Shenoy. To meet their high
reliability requirements, the Indian APEX stock exchange uses
parallel processing techniques with the MPI (message passing
interface) standard on GNU/Linux-based Intel clusters. Its
application software is developed in ANSI C, runs on all favours of
UNIX/Linux and deploys a Java-based user interface. "This is a
highly scalable solution, offering total fault-tolerance, able to
handle large processing loads and offering a highly cost-effective
solution", said Shenoy.

IIT Mumbai computer centre head Dr. G Sivakumar, from the
prestigious technology training temple of western India, says, "We
have 5000+ nodes on our campus. When we talk of users and
management, the nightmare begins. GNU/Linux is the sine qua non (of
our smooth functioning)."

Professor "Siva" explained how one of India's best factories
for engineering brains uses GNU/Linux for its firewalls, load
balancing, traffic control, domain name services, LDAP, e-mail
services, web-browsing issues (blocking out "bad stuff", such as
pirated entertainment and pornography), network and user
management, virus detection, mail usage statistics, web proxies and
much more. "Spam-assassin is very good [to block spam]. Squid is
the best proxy server in the world. You'll see I'm not very guarded
about my statements" said the engineering don with a twinkle in the
eye.

Sivakumar argues that IIT-B is not only a "consumer" of
GNU/Linux but is also contributing back to the community. He points
to Varta, which offers authenticated access to IIT-B newsgroups for
alumni and a sophisticated HTTP to NNTP gateway, apart from
solutions for secular on-line polls and surveys.

Students have worked on streaming audio/video based on
ffmpeg, Palnatir and mplayer. MTech projects include HyperSuit, a
document object model, and Arrowsmith, for network discovery and
performance measurement.

Narayanan Subramaniam, technical head for R&D of Benz
Infotech, an Indian firm based in the southern city of Kochi,
points to the "cost effective nature of GNU/Linux-based
super-computing for the enterprise. It can be used in applications
ranging from movie animation to computational fluid dynamics and
astrophysics", he said.

Sachin Dabi, head of enterprise sales for Red Hat India, said
their product was going onto 6,000 desktops in schools in North
India. For the Tata Share Registry, two Linux-based servers could
do the same job as ten in a "pre-Linux environment", he said. In
addition, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, a
land-records system was saving money on OS licenses and offering
results in Indian language solutions.

Interested enterprises were prompted by Government of India's
Department of IT senior director S. R. "Ramki" Ramakrishna:
"GNU/Linux has matured to a stage where you can put your money on
it. It's a very serious contender for you to look at. I've had
corporations coming back and say, 'We want to present a business
case to our board (on the adoption of FLOSS), so what should we do
next?'"

Ramki argued that while statistics showed there were 470
Indian companies working on software products, the strength of this
region lay more in services.

To this end, India's government has launched the Linux India
Initiative, though Ramakrishna admitted this has taken time to get
off the ground. Linux India Initiative is aimed at creating
resource centres, special interest groups, pilot sites,
localization of FLOSS products and commissioning research studies.
It also helps introduce FLOSS into the curriculum of engineering
colleges.

Ramakrishna said that the government could help to identify
areas of opportunity in free software, work with all stake-holders
and take a leading role in promoting free software for
e-governance, tens of thousands of schools, rural computerisation
projects and SMEs (small-and-medium enterprises). In addition,
Ramakrishna said, the government needs to "disabuse everyone of the
notion that being pro-open source or pro-GNU/Linux is being
anti-any vendor [read: Microsoft] in any way.... Everybody talks
about GNU/Linux as a great opportunity. If we ignore it, it will be
at our own peril."

Without over-estimating local strengths, Ramakrishna believes
India and South Asia could play a role in "influencing GNU/Linux's
fortunes. But we should not over-estimate our strengths. We need to
work with other countries, and watch developments in other parts of
the globe", he added.

Recalling the statements made by Indian President APJ Abdul
Kalam, a former top scientist himself, which strongly favoured
FLOSS, Ramakrishna said: "I was with three very senior colleagues.
The first said he (the President) shouldn't have spoken. The second
man said, in any case, it didn't matter what the President said
because the government of India is not run by the President.
Personally, I can say that the President's statement inspired
me."

Participants at this most recent meeting included techies and
executives from banking and finance, including Canara Bank, ING
Vysya Life Insurance, Kotak Securities, Syndicate Bank; IT
corporates, such as Blue Star Infotech, Micropro Software of Pune;
giant Government of India companies, including Hindustan Petroleum,
Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd; academic institutions, such as KReSIT
of the IIT Bombay; and others.

"So far we have been wondering whether GNU/Linux is ready for
the Enterprise. But now I think we should wonder whether the
Enterprise is ready for GNU/Linux," quipped Prof G. Nagarjuna.
Nagarjuna, an educator and articulate free software evangelist from
Mumbai's Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, was referring to
the feet-dragging and visible reluctance, especially among Indian
IT majors.

In general, smaller Indian firms and end-users have been more
bolder in experimenting with the FLOSS model of software. But
bigger, export-oriented firms that have made their millions from a
services model apparently harbor fears about the way free sharing
of code could impact their abilities to earn from overseas
contracts.

Prof Nagarjuna egged on software firms, saying

Software is like knowledge. The more you sell,
your stocks don't get depleted. Software is not to be treated like
a (scarce) commodity. The only business model that follows from
here is the service model. Don't use any technology which you don't
have the rights to repair. Enterprises should have control over
what they do.

Nagarjuna challenged the view that India was earning
significantly from software exports. He said, "This is a myth. We
export services, not software [products]. But we do import software
[products]." He said he had approached the big players' software
body NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service
Companies, which has traditionally been seen as a pro-proprietary
software organisation) for details to "prepare a balance sheet" of
the costs of proprietary software products India exports and
imports. "If we start paying for all the software we use [a lot of
software used in India is illegally copied], will the balance still
be positive? I'm not so sure", he argued.

India also is developing tools that business can use, such as
the spreadsheet program Gnumeric, which is available in Hindi and
Malayalam, two languages spoken by millions. The Malayalam language
endeavor was done by volunteers who received support from the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which offered funding
worth Rs 600,000 (less than US $13,000) to volunteers who put the
solution together in nine months flat.

Furthermore, India is a "strategic region" for one of the
world's most popular alternative databases, MySQL, which is
promising firms "superior and affordable" software. "India
traditionally has developed software for other countries. Right
now, we see an increasing trend of developing software for the
internal market. It is a strategic market for us", said MySQL
spokesperson Gerardo Narvaja.

Some here have coined a new label for code that gets packaged
as free or open source--"Swatantra Software", an evocative term
that implies freedom and harkens back to India's historic
anti-colonial struggle.

India isn't going to make any progress on this front as long as pseudo-jounalists keep putting words in other people's mouths.

Dr.Ramakrishnan has never ever used the term "GNU/Linux", and certainly didn't at this event. He is well aware of the politics behind the term and avoids them like the plague. He even named the Government initiative "Linux India".

Attributing such phrases to him invalidates the entire article. If the New York Times is big enough to admit that their reporter lied, shouldn't LJ check on what it publishes as well?

There you go. A totally irrelevant attack based on the GNU vs. Linux issue. What does this have to do with the main theme of FLOSS in India ? Not everybody is dogmatic about this and may use the terms "Linux" and "GNU/Linux" interchangably since both do represent different aspects of the linux reality.

Its nice of some Indian authors to jump into this linux bandwagon and try to show how much linux is making inroads into India. But much of this is propaganda and eyewash. While linux has made a few inroads in India, it does not compare in any way with its progress in other parts of the world. I know of several friends/relatives who use computers but not one uses linux (they use winME, win XP home etc.). Here are some examples:

Is such a development likely in India as well? Not as long as there is no agreement between governments in this large, quasi-federal country. As Gopalakrishnan wrote in a recent article: "Why has there not been a national policy as yet on promotion of open source software? Part of the reason is that the policy leadership of southern Indian States where the issues are more focused on IT production than on IT use." Clearly, the free software movement faces a much bigger challenge in this country.

Red Flag Software Co., Ltd. (Red Flag Software) was founded by Software Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and NewMargin Venture Capital.

Where is the Indian parallel ? An Indian-based linux distribution called ELX-linux is not doing too good.

3. Its largely a cultural issue. India, historically, has never been a land where knowledge has been disseminated without discrimination based on caste, color and sex. And this state of affairs continues even today. Even without Bill Gates, there are enough evil forces in that country to prevent the entry of a way of thinking (thats what FLOSS is all about) that may very well threaten the "status quo". FLOSS is too "equal" for such countries. Besides, FLOSS does not have the "American" glamour that Uncle Bill (and Uncle Sam who often aids him) has.

4. Another cultural problem is that not withstanding the large number of software professionals (one of the largest in the world) coming from India, very few are OSS developers. They are just paid professionals who put down code and go home at the end of the working day. They would rather spend the rest of the day in idle gossip (and watch trash Bollywood films) than invest time in developing OSS. They lack the ideals that spur developers elsewhere to write quaility OSS. And this is also very true of Indian students of computer-related fields. For them, its just a means of making some money by learning some tricks of coding, not about principles of freedom. Freedom and rights are nowhere near the radar.

Gandhi was very much anti-technology. He would not have touched them. He was also against import of foreign products. It so happens that almost all computer hardware (processor, memory, motherboard etc.) and OSS software is manufactured/developed outside of India. For all you know, he would have preferred a Indian made closed-source, costly, junk software to a "foreign" free and open-source software (that is produced by a truly global collaboration of developers from US, Europe, East Asia and Latin America). So, please stop this Gandhian ass-licking. Progress does not require Gandhi's approval.

And you obviously have no clue about Indian history. Gandhi wanted a rural economy while J. Nehru wanted an industrialized country. Gandhi's vision included local "cottage industries", not the global industrialization which has generated the worldwide computer industry (linux is a consequence of that). Gandhi was dead against any form of globalization. Linux is the product of globalization.

In any case, it does not matter what Gandhi would or would not have done, since he's dead. If India needs to be on the OSS forefront, Indians will need to develop quality OSS code rather than worship their gods (includes Vishnu and Gandhi).

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